The art of the craft You're broke. The money-sucking holidays are coming up, and you've got to buy presents for a truckload of people, including a picky cousin whose house is already chock-full of stuff that's never used.

Munchies With all those honey-flavored oats and nuts, granola is tempting enough for Rhode Island's neo-hippie set. But add a scoop of goodwill to the mix and you invite a veritable stampede of Birkenstocks.

Behind Bars It sounds almost too cruel to be true: a woman inmate is shackled to a hospital bed while delivering her baby. Sadly, hundreds of women across the country endure that humiliation, an unthinkable indignity for an already downtrodden group.

Film dept. One of the most powerful scenes in The Two Escobars is an interview with a Colombian assassin who chuckles as he recalls how his boss, the drug lord Pablo Escobar, compulsively listened to a soccer match on a portable radio as the gunshots of police hunting him down in a ditch rang out in the distance.

Airborne They're typical teenagers. They like sports, surfing, the Dave Matthews Band, girls and any food put in front of them, except tomatoes. Oh, they're fearless too, not shy about flying off a pier in a homemade winged chariot and plunging into the churning waters below.

Exoneration If you haven’t heard of Betty Anne Waters, the Bristol pub owner and single mother of two who put herself through college and law school in a nearly three-decade crusade to overturn her brother’s murder conviction, you will soon.

A casualty of war, and a fierce debate Linda Bhatia gave her son’s Scout badges to his old pack and his 700 books to his alma mater, Brown University, but she will never let go of the things he had in his final days: his compass, the dimes in his pocket, his wallet, the watch he was probably wearing when a roadside bomb killed him in Afghanistan.

Gatherings Roadblock flew in from Miami, and Tunnel Rat took the train from Jersey. But it was Baroness, aka Penelope Pappas, who got the cameras clicking at the 17th annual G.I. Joe Collectors’ Convention.

Visitations Terry McMillan, best known for her blockbuster novels Waiting to Exhale and How Stella Got Her Groove Back , made a quick stop in South Providence the other day to raise money for the Community Preparatory School and talk shop — with 10-year-olds.

In the Garden Drive south on Broad Street past the markets and churches, take a left on Somerset and there, in a clearing of raised garden beds behind a chain-link fence, you will find Phil Edmonds with his peas.

Crossing Lines Schaefer, the Brown University student recently killed by a suspected drunk driver on the streets of Providence, left behind hundreds of friends, including soldiers in the Israeli army, with whom he served for three years before coming to Brown.